Bad Romance: The Vicky White Story (Julijette, Corus, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, January 21) I watched three Lifetime movies in a row, for the last two of which I was joined by my husband Charles. As with last week’s Sunday Lifetime marathon, the first of the three films was by far the best: Bad Romance: The Vicky White Story. It’s based on the true story of Vicky Davis White (Wendi McLendon-Covey, who’s also credited with the nebulous title “executive producer), a sheriff’s deputy and jail guard in Lauderdale County, Alabama, who at age 56 arranged the escape of a prisoner she had fallen in love (or at least lust) with, Casey White (Rossif Sutherland): no relation, though her fellow guards had noticed the attraction between them and joked that they were married because they had the same last name. Bad Romance was directed with taut energy by Stanley M. Brooks from a tight-knit screenplay by Richard Blaney and Gregory Small that stuck quite closely to the facts as reported in a CNN dispatch from May 10, 2022 (https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/06/cnn-info/vicky-white-what-we-know-alabama-inmate-disappear/index.html). Bad Romance limns the story of Vicky White and her unfulfilled dreams that finally led her into the bizarre and hopeless relationship with one of the prisoners she was supposed to be supervising. Her mother Susan Davis (Maria Stephenson Kerr) was also her next-door neighbor and kept popping over to Vicky’s home with one loser man after another whom she was trying to matchmake for Vicky. Her ex-husband Tommy White (Stephen Eric McIntyre) had fallen ill with Parkinson’s disease and she had volunteered to be his caregiver, stopping at his home on her way back from work to feed him and help him into bed.

The film reminded me of Douglas Sirk’s Shockproof (1948); indeed Bad Romance is arguably Shockproof with the genders reversed (in Shockproof the male lead is a probation officer who falls for a female prisoner in his charge and ends up on the run with her), and like Sirk and his writer, future director Sam Fuller, Brooks, Blaney and Small make much of the fact that a person who is used to enforcing the law is now fleeing from it and has to adjust her entire mind-set as to who is who and which side they’re now on. (I’ve made two moviemagg.com posts on Shockproof: in 2008 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2008/10/shockproof-columbia-1948-rel-1949.html and in 2023 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/07/shockproof-columbia-1948-released-1949.html.) Bad Romance is also impeccably cast, especially in the two leads. Wendi McLendon-Covey projects just the right clash of seeming integrity and unfulfilled desires (she’d be the obvious next-in-line for all the middle-aged frump projects Frances McDormand turns down, not that there are that many) and Rossif Sutherland (son of Donald and brother of Kiefer) is equally good at giving us his character’s hair-trigger temper (we get the impression that that’s what got him in trouble with the law in the first place; early on he’s sentenced to 75 years for a meth-fueled rampage in which, among other things, he shot and almost killed his previous girlfriend), his rambunctious sexuality and the sheer drive and energy that attracts Vicky to him. I also quite liked Keishon Joseph, who I’m presuming played the young, hot-looking Black fellow guard whom I spent much of the movie wishing that Vicki would have been attracted to instead of ultra-bad-boy Casey White, especially in the scene in which Casey takes him hostage with a stolen gun and makes a solo escape attempt before Vicki agrees to help him in his subsequent break-out.

One aspect of Bad Romance I found especially interesting is it dramatized how much jail imprisons the people who work there almost as much as it does the actual prisoners. Their actions are constantly watched over by surveillance cameras and every time they have to go from one place in the facility to another they’re searched and/or observed. At one point Vicki’s carefully laid plan to break Casey out of jail is nearly undone when her fellow guard Gus Foster (Aaron Hughes) tells her that because of a recent change in policy, she’s not allowed to take Casey out to a (nonexistent) court-ordered psychiatric evaluation alone but he must accompany them. She’s able to weasel out of that one and take him alone anyway. I was a bit disappointed that Brooks, Blaney and Small didn’t give us more soft-core porn between the leads – I was expecting a vivid dramatization of the sheer excitement of their first lovemaking after they’d been dreaming and fantasizing about each other for two years – but other than that Bad Romance is an impeccably staged film, going far beyond the good clean-dirty fun I was expecting from the title and basic premise. Even the ending is vividly done: on the run in their third car (Vicki has purchased the various vehicles from the money she got by selling her house at well below market value, and what she either doesn’t know or doesn’t stop to think about is that surveillance cameras have covered their every move and so the cops chasing them know exactly what they’re driving at any given moment – more evidence that the sheer ubiquity of surveillance cameras is making it virtually impossible for modern-day criminals to pull off the Bonnie and Clyde act) they’re being chased through Indiana by at least four police vehicles.

There’s a scene in which they actually make it across the Canadian border (Mexico would have been considerably closer to Alabama than Canada, but they decided to go to Canada since neither of them spoke Spanish – which Casey refers to as “Mexican,” like the villain of Ida Lupino’s classic film noir The Hitchhiker from 1953, until Vicki corrects him), but it’s later revealed to be just a dying fantasy. Vicki actually died in the car crash, and while there were intimations from the authorities that she committed suicide, the film depicts it as an accident. Casey’s character takes on a real pathos when he calls out to the police as they’re re-arresting him and asks them to look after his wife (they’re not literally married, but they went through an al fresco ceremony of their own at an Indiana motel where they holed up for five days until Casey started complaining that he felt like he was back in prison), either not knowing or not realizing that she was fatally injured in the crash. (The real Casey White was charged with murdering her, but that was dropped as part of a plea deal by which he agreed to plead guilty to escape charges and accept an extension of his already essentially life sentence.) Bad Romance is a quite remarkable movie and the sort of diamond in the rough we longtime Lifetime viewers keep hoping for from this channel.